The Rampage of Ryan O'Hara (8 page)

“Hey, gringo, what’s happenin’?”

Matulski jumped up and reached for the drawer to a filing cabinet where he had a gun.

“Wrong,” Pablo said as Oscar fired a shot into Matulski’s shoulder. Matulski screamed as the impact knocked him to the floor.

Oscar went over to the downed man and laughed. “Hey, you no look so tough now, gringo.”

Matulski gritted his teeth and tried hard not to show his pain. Yes, he was a tough guy, but even a hard ass like him wouldn’t be able to stand up to the treatment he was about to be subjected to. “No,” thought Pablo, “Mr. Matulski would soon be crying like a little bitch.”

Oscar and Antonio dragged the injured car thief into the garage as Pablo locked the front door. Spread-eagling him on a workbench, they clamped the man’s hands into the vises on either side and tied his feet to the end with electrical wire. They finished their prep work by duct-taping his mouth shut. Pablo approached Matulski, whose eyes betrayed his terror. The tough guy
tried to talk, but the duct tape prevented his protests from being heard.

“You know, gringo, you shouldn’t have fucked up my boy when he came in here to collect your overdue taxes last week. What you did was very disappointing to me. All I wanted was a little cut of your action so we could all benefit from the profits you were making. I allowed you to operate in my territory and how did you repay me? You beat up one of my business associates. That was a very unwise move on your part, Mr. Matulski.”

Oscar and Antonio went to another part of the garage and returned with a large acetylene tank, a torch, and an arc welder. Pablo watched as the two men donned the eye protection and prepared to go to work.

Bad Bob also watched. He squirmed violently as he tried to break loose of the vises and electrical wire holding him to the bench.

Looking into the car thief’s horror-filled eyes, Pablo said, “Take a good look at us,
cabrone
, because we are the last thing you will ever see.”

Antonio went to work with the arc welder, melting metal into the eyes of Bad Bob Matulski as Oscar set about amputating his ankles with the acetylene torch. The car thief squirmed violently and moaned but soon went limp.

Pablo cursed as he thought back to that night. “Fucking cops. Why the hell did they have to be on Florida Street on that particular occasion? Christ, we hadn’t seen any fuzz on that block for a week. The one time they drove by had to be when Oscar, Antonio, and I were exiting the garage.”

In the ensuing gun battle, Pablo and one of the cops were wounded. Oscar and Antonio were killed.

Pablo was tried and convicted for the murder of his two fellow gang members, who’d died as a result of the felonies they had been committing together. He was also convicted of the attempted murder of the two police officers and the mutilation of Bob Matulski.

Now he sat in the exercise yard at San Quentin prison, where he would be spending the remainder of his life.

Glancing over to the group of convicts from the White Alliance, he caught the eye of their leader, Grady Milsap, a blonde six-footer with a body covered in tattoos. Like Pablo, he was a lifer. They’d helped each other out in the past and would do so again today.

Pablo ran his hand through his thick black hair and Grady nodded. It was time.

R
yan was at peace. Holding Carol close to him at the edge of a World War II bunker on the southern slope of the Marin Headlands, he marveled at the windswept panorama that lay before him, convinced that he was standing at the center of one of the most spectacularly breathtaking vistas in all the world. Spread out before him in all directions was a natural canvas that combined the creative magnificence of God and man.

To the west were the Farallon Islands, home to great whites and their prey, the sea lion. To the north lay Mount Tamalpais and Point Reyes. To the south, along the northern shore of San Francisco, the exclusive Sea
Cliff neighborhood and Presidio were perfect backdrops for sailboats moving in and out of the Golden Gate.

Alcatraz and Angel Islands basked in the shadows of the eastern hills and graced the waters of the bay, standing watch over the Golden Gate Bridge, which in turn stood as a sentinel to the west of Coit Tower, the Trans American, and other architectural icons that silhouette the San Francisco skyline.

This beautiful and peaceful place was where Carol and he always began the last day of every visit. It was where they came to speak tenderly to one another while fantasizing about how their lives might have been had their paths not pushed them in opposite directions.

The sight of fishing boats chugging toward Fisherman’s Wharf with their catches of the day mirrored times long since past when the city was defined by the ethnic communities that made it special. Days when Italians, Irish, Chinese, Latinos, and Russians all occupied their little areas of the city and where if one wanted to experience the culture and food of a certain community of immigrants, one could. Those were the days before social engineers and politicians made this type of community cohesion among ethnic groups a cause for leftists with the mantra that everyone had to mix or the society was somehow corrupt.

Ryan broke the silence. “How’s the Jib sound?” The Jib was one of their favorite restaurants along the bay in Sausalito, just north of the Golden Gate.

“The Jib’s fine.” Carol sighed. She really didn’t want to leave the serenity of the little perch they’d occupied for the past hour or so. Leaving always meant the
beginning of the inevitable farewell—a farewell that became more difficult each time. She wasn’t yet ready to let go of the intimacy and passion of the past two days. Neither was Ryan, but this was how it would be until he finally broke free from the life he’d chosen and came home to her for good—assuming she was still waiting.

Ryan remembered the first time he’d laid eyes on Carol Katzenbacher at a small dinner party thrown by mutual friends in North Beach. He’d just gone through a very messy divorce and the furthest thing from his mind was getting involved with another woman. His ex-wife, Ciara, had been a jealous, lazy, shiftless, and self-centered narcissist who’d put demands on him that were impossible to meet. Her main activities in life were watching soap operas and spending money. She neither worked nor performed the normal tasks of a stay-at-home wife.

The marriage had begun to unravel when Ryan returned home from one of his lengthy deployments and discovered that she’d not only spent all his hostile-fire pay and depleted their bank account but had amassed a debt that put him in jeopardy with his superiors when the creditors came looking for him. The last straw had been when he’d found out that she’d been carrying on an affair with her best friend’s husband.

After the divorce, Ryan was determined to avoid serious and long-lasting relationships. He held firm to that decision—until he met Carol.

Carol had all the qualities that his ex-wife lacked. She was extremely attractive. Her angelic face, brown eyes, and auburn hair were complemented by the most perfectly proportioned body he had ever seen. She dressed immaculately and turned heads everywhere she went.

More importantly, however, she possessed a quality that many modern-day women lack. She was selfless. There wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do to make him happy. She was a perfect lover and confidant, and Ryan hoped she would someday be his wife.

They sat together in silence at the Jib, looking out over the water as they sipped merlot. No finer wines could be found than those from the Napa Valley—that not-so-far-away place where Ryan had spent the most troubled years of his life.

“I’m going to miss you, my love. And when I’m sitting on top of some godforsaken, snow-covered mountain in Afghanistan freezing my ass off, I’ll relive these past few days. Just thinking about your embrace and those luscious, tender lips of yours will be enough to warm my bones.”

“Your what?” Carol mocked, as if mistaking the word
bones
for something else. Then she added, “Oh, your bones. Right.” They both laughed.

They lingered a while longer, stalling for time. The thought of parting once again was almost more than they could bear. When they finally left the restaurant, they headed to Carol’s apartment on Nob Hill, where they spent one last sweet but sad night together.

The next morning, Ryan took one final look at his sleeping beauty.

The innocent love of his life knew very little of what he did for a living and nothing of how he had been spending his time lately. He hoped he could keep it that way.

He closed the door to the bedroom and slipped quietly out of the apartment.

Having already closed down his home, he headed out across the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge toward his next destination—Sedona, Arizona, where he had some more unfinished business.

R
yan turned on the radio as he drove past the windmills on Altamont Pass and headed south toward Interstate 5. The sun was just peeking over the eastern horizon and he was thankful that his southern route would preclude the aggravation of having it glare through the windshield. He half listened to the repetitive chatter that emanated from the local all news station, not absorbing much of what was being reported until he heard something about an incident at San Quentin prison.

He listened as the reporter stated, “Prison officials have confirmed that the medium-security facility is still in lockdown after yesterday’s riot, which resulted
from a brawl between three prison gangs. Members of Hijos de Zapata, the White Alliance, and the African Guerrilla Brotherhood clashed after the White Alliance challenged the African Guerrillas over rights to a certain section of the exercise yard. In the ensuing melee, the Zapatas went to the assistance of the Whites and the fight quickly escalated into a riot. The prison SWAT team had to be called and, after tear gas failed to quell the disturbance, shots were fired that resulted in the death of Black Guerrilla inmate Clarence Newton.

“After order was restored, it was discovered that two other inmates, Albert Jefferson and Anthony Upton, were also dead. It’s been determined that they died at the hands of the two rival gangs. Jefferson was found on the ground with a crushed skull, apparently the result of a forty-five pound weight disc being dropped on him. Upton lay nearby with a broken neck caused by a blow from a blunt instrument, possibly a weight-lifting bar.

“Jefferson and Upton were serving life terms for the 1980 bombing death of San Francisco police sergeant Jack Oldham. They and other members of the radical Black Socialist Army, along with a female member of the Marxist group Lenin’s Legion, lured the sergeant and other cops to an abandoned house in San Francisco on the false report of a rape. Oldham was killed and two of his officers were wounded when the front porch blew up. A chase and gunfight ensued in which their female accomplice and the driver of the getaway vehicle were killed. Jefferson and Upton were captured after fleeing the scene.”

Ryan smiled and said aloud to himself, “Thanks, Sal.”

O
rlando and Inez Mendora were desperate. Their lives had been on a downward spiral since the day ten years earlier when their son, Pablo, went to prison. What little savings Orlando and Inez once had were gone, depleted by the attorney’s fees they’d spent in a futile attempt to see their son acquitted.

Following the trial, Orlando suffered a series of heart attacks, which forced him to quit his job and take a small pension. The pension, combined with social security, was barely enough to buy food. There was nothing left over for rent or any of the other necessities of modern living. Inez was battling cancer and often had to forego treatment and medicine for her disease in order
to avoid dipping into the small amount of money they set aside every month for food. Their unpaid utilities had been turned off and they sat in their flat bundled in extra layers of clothing. They were sick, cold, and miserable.

In a few days they would be evicted, and what lay ahead after that was anyone’s guess. The couple, known for their generosity to others, had received no offers of aid, food, shelter, or any of the other things they had provided to the have-nots in their neighborhood over the years. Their faith in humanity reached an all-time low as they realized that the friends they thought they had were really just fair-weather friends—here only when they were benefiting from Mendora generosity but unwilling to reciprocate in kind when their former benefactors fell on hard times.

A knock at their door surprised them. No one had visited in weeks. Who could it be? Not the sheriff’s department. Those people weren’t due to oversee their eviction for a few more days.

Orlando grabbed his cane and moved slowly to the door. “Yes, who is it?”

“A friend of Pablo Mendora,” came the answer.

Orlando knew better than to open the door to strangers, especially in this neighborhood, but the mention of his son’s name overruled his good judgment and he opened the door. The big man standing in front of him was very intimidating, but as soon as he spoke, Orlando knew he wasn’t there to cause any harm.

“I’m sorry to impose upon you like this with no prior notice, Señor Mendora, but I’ve been in contact with
Pablo and he asked me to look in on you and see if there was anything you might need.”

“
Por favor
, señor, please come in. How do you know our Pablo? Have you been in prison?”

“No, sir. I haven’t. I knew Pablo before he went to prison. I’m a businessman and he worked for me when he was a kid. We’ve kept in touch over the years and I’ve visited him occasionally. We still have some mutual acquaintances.”

Orlando studied the big man and asked, “
Como se llama
? I’m sorry. I mean, what’s your name?”

“No need to apologize, señor. I understand a little Spanish. My name’s Sal Miroglio.”

Inez entered the room and Orlando motioned to her. “Mama,
este hombre es
Sal Miroglio. He’s a friend of our Pablo.”